Rachelle Jackson, a trained nurse, pulled two policemen out of their burning squad car ... and rather than being thanked for her heroic effort, she was arrested on charges that she robbed, battered and disarmed a peace officer and jailed for 10 months!

Jackson sued the city and several Chicago police officers, and a federal jury had just awarded her almost $8 million for false arrest, malicious prosecution, coercive questioning, and intentional infliction of emotional distress:

The case began in November 2002, when a car ran a stop sign in Jackson's neighborhood, slamming into the squad car. Jackson was walking nearby and rushed to the scene. When she arrived, the officer behind the wheel was unconscious and the passenger, Officer Kelly Brogan, was dazed.

She pulled Brogan from the wreckage and helped her to a nearby stoop. Soon after, police approached Jackson and told her that the driver's weapon had been stolen. When she was asked to go to the police station for questioning, she thought it was as a witness to the accident.

Instead, Jackson was accused of the theft. She was held for two days with little food and water and was threatened with violence until she agreed to sign a statement police had prepared for her. She was then charged and spent more than 10 months in the Cook County Jail awaiting trial.

Link - via reddit

Having had bad lucks with cane toads and rabbits, scientists in Australia are worried about the next animal that could wreck the continent's ecosystem: supercats!

The Federal Government has been under fire after it was revealed last week that savannah cats - twice as big as domestic species - are being imported by pet shops.

Scientists are warning that bandicoots, bettongs, potoroos and possums could soon be on the menu for the imported creatures, which were originally bred by crossing domestic cats with the African serval cat.

Link (Photo: Mike Blake/Reuters)

Dave Bruno looked around his San Diego home one summer and realized just how much of his family's belongings were cluttering their lives. So he decided to do something about it, in a project he called The 100 Thing Challenge:

By my thirty-seventh birthday on November 12, 2008 I will have only 100 personal items. I will live for at least one year (God willing) maintaining an inventory of only 100 personal things. This challenge will help me "put stuff in its place" and also explore my belief that "stuff can be good when it serves a purpose greater than possession alone."

Lisa McLaughlin of TIME Magazine covered this story:

Excess consumption is practically an American religion. But as anyone with a filled-to-the-gills closet knows, the things we accumulate can become oppressive. With all this stuff piling up and never quite getting put away, we're no longer huddled masses yearning to breathe free; we're huddled masses yearning to free up space on a countertop. Which is why people are so intrigued by the 100 Thing Challenge, a grass-roots movement in which otherwise seemingly normal folks are pledging to whittle down their possessions to a mere 100 items. [...]

"It comes down to the products vs. the promise," says organizational consultant Peter Walsh, who characterizes himself as part contractor, part therapist. "It's not necessarily about the new pots and pans but the idea of the cozy family meals that they will provide. People are finding that their homes are full of stuff, but their lives are littered with unfulfilled promises."

Check out Dave's progress his blog, guynameddave: Link

The next time you pump gas, try to feel the pain ... of the gas station owners! Here's a report by Elizabeth Douglass and Ronald D. White of the LA Times about how gas station owners are being squeezed by high oil and gas prices:

Despite the jaw-dropping prices at the pump -- they jumped 19 cents a gallon in California to $4.43 in the last week and averaged more than $4 a gallon nationwide for the first time, the Energy Department said Monday -- service station owners aren't making the killing that motorists assume.

That's because credit card fees, the price of tanker-loads of fuel and other costs are rising so rapidly that station owners haven't been able to keep pace despite the record prices they're charging.

"People see $4 gas, and they think these retailers are making a fortune," said Ben Brockwell, a director at Oil Price Information Service, which tracks fuel prices. "The reality is these guys are being stressed to the limit."

Link

That, my friend, is what you and I and everyone else in this world started out as: the human oocyte. Dr. Jacques Donnez at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, Belgium, was carrying out a partial hysterectomy on a45-year-old woman when she ovulated.

Link - via metafilter

Behold the best Star Trek mash up ever: the animated Star Trek + William Shatner's cover of Pulp's "Common People" = greatness!

Done in the style of Kirk/Spock (or K/S) story:

In the science fiction TV series Star Trek (1966-1969), the characters of Captain James T. Kirk and his Vulcan science officer Mr. Spock share an unusually close friendship, although both characters have relationships and sexual liaisons with women. Almost from the beginning, fans noticed the loving nature of the relationship. A few fan writers started speculating about the possibility of a sexual relationship between Kirk and Spock. The Kirk/Spock phenomenon eventually took on a life of its own, and became one of the driving forces in Star Trek fanzines during their heyday.

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

Images: TCFC

Strawberry Shortcake is getting stale - the "it" doll of the 1980s just wasn't connecting with modern girls, so her corporate owner American Greeting Properties, is having pulling an extreme makeover - and they're not alone:

Strawberry Shortcake, part of a line of scented dolls, now prefers fresh fruit to gumdrops, appears to wear just a dab of lipstick (but no rouge), and spends her time chatting on a cellphone instead of brushing her calico cat, Custard. Her new look was unveiled Tuesday, along with plans for a new line of toys from Hasbro.

She is not the only aging fictional star to get a facelift. An unusually large number of classic characters for children are being freshened up and reintroduced — on store shelves, on the Internet and on television screens — as their corporate owners try to cater to parents’ nostalgia and children’s YouTube-era sensibilities. Adding momentum is a retail sector hoping to find refuge from a rough economy in the tried and true.

Brooks Barnes of the New York Times has the story: Link

(Alert: Disney is thinking of "updating" Mickey Mouse! The travesty!)

The movie may be bad, but this review by Peter Bradshaw for the Guardian is pure gold:

"Hulk. Smash!" Yes. Hulk. Smash. Yes. Smash. Big Hulk smash. Smash cars. Buildings. Army tanks. Hulk not just smash. Hulk also go rarrr! Then smash again. Smash important, obviously. Smash Hulk's USP. What Hulk smash most? Hulk smash all hope of interesting time in cinema. Hulk take all effort of cinema, effort getting babysitter, effort finding parking, and Hulk put great green fist right through it. Hulk crush all hopes of entertainment. Hulk in boring film. Film co-written by star. Edward Norton. Norton in it. Norton write it. Norton not need gamma-radiation poisoning to get big head. Thing is: Hulk head weirdly small. Compared with rest of big green body.

Read the rest of the one-star review: Link - via Kottke

We posted about the waitress who was fired for cutting her hair for charity before, but this one is even better: Darra Kollios got fired because she was laughing!

"I had a customer at the bar and the owner came up to me and said, 'Please stop laughing,' Kollios said. "We giggled -- the guy at the bar and myself. And then I said, 'Are you serious?' And he said, 'Yes, if you laugh again, you will have to go home."

Kollios said she was then fired on the spot.

Link

Psst! Our friend mental_floss is running a super secret deal for their excellent magazines.

They told me that it's the best subscription deal for the magazine ever, and I believe it ... I can't tell you the price here on Neatorama, because it's so low that it's bordering on being crazy (how do they make money? How? HOW?!)

Anyhoo, if you like Neatorama and the mental_floss blog, you're missing out if you don't read the magazine, too: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/15505

(No, I don't get paid for this shout out - I have a subscription to the magazine, and I do really like it!)

The EM Brace, a thesis project by Nick Hasty, is a wearable device that lets you experience electromagnetic radiation emitted by devices and gadgets that are around us.

Cell phones, computers, power tools - pretty much everything with electronic components emit electromagnetic frequencies (EMF) that pass through our bodies unnoticed. Nick's device translates EMF into vibrations that can be felt by the wearer.

Link (with video) | More on Nick's Blog - via Rhizome, thanks gene!

Previously on Neatorama: Become Magneto with Magnet Implants

You know what those swirly new energy-efficient fluorescent light bulbs remind me of? Ice cream! And apparently, I'm not the only one - here's Whippy (2006) made by artists Alex Garnett and Nahoko Koyama of Mixko:

Link [Flash, click on Art & Creative, then hunt for it] - via Treehugger, thanks Chris!

Photo: Naturkundliches Museum Mauritianum Altenburg [wikipedia]

Rat King doesn't mean the King of Rats, rather it is a medieval legend of what happened when a lot of rats get entangled at their tails, became stuck together and thus had to live as a giant rat ball entity. The cryptozoological curiosity became famous in Germany, with sightings as early as the 1500s. Not surprisingly, a large ball of gnawing rats was interpreted as a bad omen.

The Mauritianum museum in Altenburg, German, even has the mummified specimen of 32 rats shown above. Though scientists are skeptical of the authenticity of the specimens (rats don't normally become entangled, even when living in cramped quarters and no living rat kings have ever been sighted), the phenomenon lives on in pop culture, and after seeing this image, in my nightmares.

Link [wikipedia] - Thanks elzo!

If that's not gross enough for you, check out this video clip previously posted on Neatorama: World's Worst Mouse Plague: Millions of Mice Attack Australia

Ron of Totlol.com wrote to us about his new website, a community-moderated video website for toddlers and little kids (all the content on the site is submitted and screened by parents).

This one to the left is Crazy Worm, which is fun for all ages!

I think my little Maddy is going to like this website! http://www.totlol.com/index.php

In 1942, in the middle of nowhere, an Army engineer posted the sign "Danville, Illinois, 2835 miles" to mark his hometown while building the Alaska Highway. That started the tradition of adding one's hometown signs to the heap. Now, there are close to 50,000 65,000 signs in what became known as The Sign Post Forest.

http://www.gosleepgo.com/guide/ca/yt/watson-lake/sign-post-forest | Flickr photos of the Sign Post Forest - Thanks JR!